· Did you know Northeast Ohio’s official bike counts are being conducted this week? The region’s transportation agency (NOACA) stations volunteers to count cyclists and pedestrians at these 22 intersections (highlighted in yellow). NOACA bike planner Marc Von Allmen explains why it’s important that you roll by and get counted: “It can help us to determine what factors have a correlation with high rates of biking and walking. It helps us to more effectively prioritize limiting funding for bike and pedestrian projects.”

· This is Bike Week capped on Friday by the big Bike to Work Day. If you want to ride in a group, find a meet up location and get connected on Bike Cleveland’s site and Facebook with hundreds of regular folks who plan to bike in to work. Free coffee is on offer around town, and the downtown bike station will have a big gathering with cupcakes, coffee, conversation (and a safe place to lock up and shower).

Streets that attract people will always be at odds with roads that move cars, even in the most walkable city in the U.S. That doesn’t mean you give up the balance between the two. This is the core messages of Mark Gorton, an entrepreneur and bike commuter who grew tired of New York’s unsafe streets.

He told a City Club audience last evening that Cleveland can easily follow the example of New York where a progressive transportation department is introducing tactical urbanism—protected bike lanes, crosswalks, refuge islands, and pedestrian-only streets like Broadway in Times Square – with an eye on a balanced city, one that moves cars – if need be, a bit slower — and provides safe and attractive streets for people.

After launching successful tech firms, Gorton founded a number of online media outlets, Streetsblog being the most recognizable, to spread the word to a growing audience of people who “don’t aspire to live a suburban lifestyle”. Streetsblogs have expanded to a half-dozen cities, including Cleveland, where writers sound off on what Gorton describes as “the problem of living with cars in cities…where unintended consequences (include) the degradation of its living environment.”

Bike share is a sustainable transportation idea that is coming of age in America. Unlike some more hard-core issues, like expanding bike lanes, bike share is exciting a wider audience to consider riding a bike in their city.

The origins of modern bike share—a flexible rent and return service —can be traced to city-led programs in Paris and Washington. Images of Paris and D.C.'s bike share whipped up a frenzy that led to a dozen U.S. bike share programs starting up in the last few years. Again, these are bikes that are checked out one place with a credit card swipe and returned to another self-serve station at or near your destination.

Bike share confirms that city dwellers plus congestion and the inconvenience of parking set up well for a bike-when-you-need-it situation. Even in car-loving America, bikes suddenly become attractive when convenience and coolness are mixed in with a dose of tech.

And now, bike share is spreading beyond big and warm-climate cities, with Minneapolis, Denver and Chicago starting or running programs.

“The era of single-serve funding is over,” Gary Toth, Project for Public Spaces Director of Transportation Initiatives, declared last week in a room full of Cleveland traffic engineers and construction managers. An engineer for the New Jersey Department of Transportation in the 1970s and 80s, Toth understands the grey area and trepidation that Cleveland's Complete and Green Streets legislation represents for the men and women around the table.

Cities like Cleveland are discovering that they can create more value in this tumultuous funding landscape, he assured, when items like bike lanes are baked in to the design.

“Other cities are clamoring to do what you’ve done with Euclid Avenue.”

That clamor is driving some 280 cities who adopted Complete Streets laws, which consider the comfort of a range of 'users'—seniors, kids, walking with assistance or
who bike rarely.

Cleveland is one of the newer members to the club. It makes it all the more impressive that it managed to build the Euclid Corridor in 2008 without a local (or national) complete streets mandate.